How To Tell A Galaxy-Spanning Epic?

I wrote before on this blog about a sense of scale in space opera. Some do it better than others. I decided early on in the planning phase that there were going to be multiple arcs throughout this series, since one set of characters wouldn’t necessarily be able to see every facet of a true, galaxy-spanning war (or the forces that have set it in motion). There are three to start; Erekan Scalas is the main character for one, Gaumarus Pell for another, and the third has yet to be introduced.

Where I took a chance was introducing each arc in its own independent novel. Continue reading

A Flawed Edifice

The Triamic Hegemony might have seemed strangely monolithic to outsiders, particularly in a galaxy where a government that even encompassed an entire planet was rare. But beneath the surface, the unprecedented edifice of the Hegemony had deeper cracks than any aliens realized.

The Hegemony was ultimately built upon a stratified alliance of triamic packs. It was the result of centuries of wars for territory and dominance, out of which the order of precedence of the packs within the Hegemony slowly and painfully emerged. To some of the more idealistic aliens, the Hegemony seemed to be a dream come true, a truly interstellar civilization of a high order of technology and sociological sophistication. But it was built upon a foundation of hundreds of triamic years of ferocious bloodshed. And, as it turned out, that foundation was far shakier than believed, even by most of the triamic. Continue reading